Authored by Micaiah Bilger via The College Fix,
Stress on the body caused by racism may cut African American women’s lives short, according to a recent study by neuroscientists at Harvard and Emory universities.
Their research, published in the journal JAMA Network Open in June, found a connection between “higher self-reported racial discrimination” and “DNA methylation age acceleration” among black women.
“Racism steals time from people’s lives – possibly because of the space it occupies in the mind,” lead researchers Negar Fani and Nathaniel Harnett wrote in an article this week at The Conversation.
Fani is a professor at Emory and Harnett at Harvard, both in the areas of psychiatry and neuroscience. Both also receive funding from the National Institutes of Health, according to the article.
“Aging is a natural process. However, stress can speed up the biological clock, making people more vulnerable to aging-related diseases, from cardiovascular disease to diabetes and dementia,” they wrote.
In their study of 90 black women in the U.S., they found that those who reported being “more frequently exposed to racism showed stronger connections in brain networks involved with rumination and vigilance,” Fani and Harnett wrote.
“We found that this, in turn, was connected to accelerated biological aging.”
The scholars wrote:
Racial discrimination is a ubiquitous stressor that often goes unnoticed. It might look like a doctor questioning a Black patient’s pain level and not prescribing pain medication, or a teacher calling a Black child a “thug.” It is a constant stressor faced by Black people starting at an early age.
Rumination – reliving and analyzing an event on a loop – and vigilance, meaning being watchful for future threats, are possible coping responses to these stressors. But rumination and vigilance take energy, and this increased energy expenditure has a biological cost.
Their study found changes in two different parts of the brain that were caused by stress linked to racial discrimination.
“These brain changes, in turn, were linked to accelerated cellular aging measured by an epigenetic ‘clock,’” they wrote.
According to their findings, these “higher clock values indicate that someone’s biological age is greater than their chronological age. In other words, the space that racist experiences occupy in people’s minds has a cost, which can shorten the lifespan.”
Fani and Harnett said they plan to conduct more research on aging and racism in the future. Among other things, they said they want to explore “how different types of racial discrimination and coping styles influence brain and body responses.”
As to the purpose of their research, Fani and Harnett said a greater understanding of the issue can lead to better therapeutic and prevention measures, including “programs that target implicit bias in physicians and teachers.”